Stack Overflow sees many questions asked repeatedly, despite the large quantity of existing content, because it's not always easy to know the best keywords to use in the search.

Long-time users tend to know when and where there are already adequate answers on site, and will just go and find the duplicate rather than attempt to write up a better answer covering the same thing. This is good for the site, the most common/popular questions are easier to maintain and keep current, and it prevents fragmentation of info.

Accurately finding dupes is an important curatorial role for the continued health of the content on site, but it's not really incentivized at all (on the contrary, just answering dupes is incentivized). My suspicion is that many users will just answer dupes for a while, but eventually get bored of writing the same things over and over again, and then take on a more janitorial role and not care about rep anymore.

However, I think the site should more strongly send the signal to newer users that finding adequate content already existing on site is a good thing, and it will help the search engine in the long run and improve search results for all visitors.

Points up for discussion

Badge names: not particularly attached to these ones, just throwing some ideas out there.

How to incentivize accurate dupe finding? Don't want people to "roboclose" trying to get the badges. There needs to be a way to measure the accuracy, e.g. the question was not subsequently re-opened, O.P. clicked that "yes those answers helped me" button, and the badge-earners had to have a >90% accuracy or something like that.

Question age - should it be considered in the calculation? I don't really want to incentivize users to go digging up old questions to VTC. The goal is to moderate the flood of new questions from users who were not able to find existing answers in the search.

Should there be rep for this? We do see that even the tiny amount of rep from edits encourages new users to propose edits. Perhaps a well-proposed duplicate should also earn rep for new users up to some threshold?

Have you excluded persons with < 3k who just flags for dupe closer on purpose or was this an oversight? Should there be different badges for users who look for dupes, but can only flag, not vote to close?
– TomFeb 18 at 20:50

27

@Tom I didn't intend to exclude them, no - if you flagged for it, and it was accurate, then yes that should count just as much as being one of the voters.
– wimFeb 18 at 20:53

8

The the description would need a slight adjustment to avoid specific words like "close", because they cannot close. Or maybe something like "Participate in closing x questions as duplicate"? That would include flaggers and close voters.
– TomFeb 18 at 20:57

7

Why must every action be rewarded? Why can't users just close question as duplicates when it's appropriate?
– Security HoundFeb 18 at 20:58

72

@SecurityHound Why have badges at all? Accurately finding dupes is an important curatorial role for continued health of the content on site. Badges are there to gently steer or encourage certain activities. My thought is that it could make users click earlier on that having their question closed as a dupe is not necessarily a bad thing, no shame in that.
– wimFeb 18 at 21:03

46

@SecurityHound It would just be a little nice thing to reward something useful. Users can get burned out doing all these mundane cleanup tasks and often getting called "rude" for doing so - a little appreciation would be nice and motivating. A badge like that wouldn't hurt.
– Modus TollensFeb 18 at 21:03

9

@wim I agree that a little bit of reputation for new users would be a good thing as well, to manifest the idea that closing as dupes is encouraged and helpful. It could be done similar to edits - stop earning rep for dupe closure once a certain amount of reputation is reached.
– Modus TollensFeb 18 at 21:07

11

Note that for some other badges (voting/reviewing) accuracy is of no concern, so I don't see why this one should be different, especially since for non-gold badge holders it requires consensus on that there's at least a duplicate. Of course, in general, accuracy is important, but I don't think we should overcomplicate a badge.
– Erik AFeb 18 at 21:20

25

@SecurityHound so far SO/SE agrees with you - finding duplicates is "punished" by the fact one loses rep they can easily gain by answering multiple questions in time taken to search for duplicate and by daily "those @#$@ elitists duplicated my question instead of copy-pasting answer" posts/comments. It's very hard to vote on this proposal without knowing what SE thinks about duplicates for future...
– Alexei LevenkovFeb 19 at 3:48

17

@SecurityHound I don't get your comment... To even start searching for duplicate one need to know the answer... and it is very rare (ignoring NRE cases) when writing a good answer would be slower than finding the correct duplicate for me... My point is one erns more reputation by providing good answers to duplicate questions than searching for duplicates. Both reputation rewards and poster's feedback stacked against looking for duplicates for very long time.
– Alexei LevenkovFeb 19 at 4:11

19

Having a reward for it in the software has a systemic implication, @SecurityHound. It's marked very very clearly as desirable behavior. If done right, this could be a new tool for helping folks understand the reasons duplicate closure exists and why, when used properly, it is a helpful action (instead of being the hostile reflex of a power-mad elite noob-hating moderator).
– jscsFeb 21 at 0:53

6

Flagging posts has been a rather low success rate operation for me, FWIW. When I flag posts (even ones that IMO were clear cut duplicates) they tend to be aged away. Flagging noisy comments works very well though.
– jrhMay 10 at 23:49

This will definitely incentivize robo closures. Adding rep to it would be a disaster. While there could be some work done with making progress in the dupe-world (such as one boxing the answer into the question closed as a duplicate), I don't think this would be progress.
– Travis JMay 11 at 18:08

34

Incentivize accurate dupe finding only, somehow. The system is already being gamed by users just answering dupes over and over again, fragmenting info and muddying up the search results, so the baseline of doing nothing is not much better. I'm sure we can come up with some way where the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?
– wimMay 11 at 22:30

28 Answers
28

YES. I agree with this and I think this should work the same way as edits like you mentioned.

I always notice new users answering trivial and repeated questions, but we cannot really blame them because of the gamification system and getting the +10 and the +15 when you are at only 100 is great! (we all started there). It's then our job (long-time users) to do the duty work by closing/deleting such questions.

On the other hand, we also notice new users jumping to edit questions as much as possible to also earn the +2, so if we do the same with duplicate closure, we may encourage them to close more than answering.

I would imagine the system this way:

You flag the question as possible duplicate of.

If the question is closed with two more votes, a gold user or by the OP, then you earn +2. I would even consider a rep of +5 or +10.

It is as simple as that.

When you reach the ability to cast a close vote (3000 reputation points), you no more get the +2.

In this system, only the person who gave the first flag will get the reputation points. It's like the person who suggested the edit and the others who approved don't get any reputation points. We don't give reputation points to the gold badge owner or to users that can cast a close vote. Such users are no more new and they don't need reputation points for finding dupes (they can simply earn the badge by closing more questions).

We may retract the reputation points in case the question is reopened. This will consider the accuracy.

I also don't think the age of the question should be considered. Closing old questions is a good thing, but to avoid any kind of abuse we may consider a flag ban if a user is giving a lot of duplicate flags that are not followed by a closure (no one agrees with his/her duplicate suggestion).

I would also increase the threshold for the badges to have something like:

You're the first person I thought of who would achieve these badges ;)
– j08691Feb 20 at 21:00

9

@j08691 yep, I can even get the gold twice with my 3000+ duplicate ;)
– Temani AfifFeb 20 at 21:36

1

Thinking obscurely into the future, what kind of December Hat would you award to users that earn more rep in one week from dupe-closing versus other rep-earning endeavors? Sounds like a fun challenge!
– mickmackusaMay 10 at 13:39

10

I think awarding more than 5 points would be to heavy of an impact on the "trust metric". I can agree with unilaterally closed reward of 2pts. If the OP agrees that the earlier dupe page is sufficient in resolving the question, allow the OP to "accept" the closure -- this should award the OP an additional 3pts for being so accurate and helpful.
– mickmackusaMay 10 at 13:42

10

Regarding the accuracy cross-check of whether or not a question was re-opened, I think the closure should be deemed faulty if re-opened AND the question was not edited (or not edited by the closer -- otherwise the closer could edit after closing to protect themselves). Ultimately, if the closer has an unsavory rate of dupe closures being re-opened, then I think it is appropriate to temporarily ban the user from closing while they review the previously re-opened questions.
– mickmackusaMay 10 at 13:45

5

“we may consider a flag ban if a user is giving a lot of duplicate flags that are not followed by a closure” – That would only work if there was a working system that made sure that questions with one close vote are also seen at some point by others. It’s very often that I vote to close older questions (two weeks+) and those never accumulate another vote because they are simply never visited again.
– pokeMay 10 at 14:50

3

@TemaniAfif Oh, we could get the gold badge multiple times? Would approve.
– BergiMay 10 at 15:04

6

Regarding "When you ... close vote ..., you no more get the +2": I disagree. Using the "edit" analogy: you get the bonus when your suggested edit gets approved by someone. You no longer get the bonus when you edit without approval. The same for duplicate-marking: you get the bonus when your vote accumulates more votes so the question gets marked as duplicate. You no longer get the bonus when you can mark as duplicate unilaterally (this is my idea, and is different from what this answer describes). In my opinion, there should be no difference between "flag" and "vote".
– anatolygMay 10 at 16:07

6

To extend my comment about awarding up to 5 rep for a good closure... The effect of allowing the OP to optionally "accept" a duplicate target, has an additional benefit -- when the OP has the power to award rep to the highest quality dupe target, then closers will learn that directing the OP to huge/general/unwieldy canonical pages (how do I: use regex / check for errors / sort / etc.) has a low probability of being accepted because most researchers are not going to have the will to read a mile of text for the little bit that they need. This makes those "go away" closures less likely.
– mickmackusaMay 10 at 23:05

11

When you reach the ability to cast a close vote (3000 reputation points), you no more get the +2 - wrong decision. When somebody reaches 3000, (s)he wants to get more (10000 looks interesting to me, mod tools) (s)he starts to answer dupe questions instead of closing.
– sanyashMay 10 at 23:34

7

@sanyash I considered the fact that when a user reach 3K, he become mature enough to understand that curation is important and he should keep closing even without Reputation but of course this is an ideal world because in reality some user reach 40K and still answer trivial duplicates.
– Temani AfifMay 11 at 0:50

7

I'd add that a flag for dup-closure must be for a dup-target which ends up in the dup-target list after the question is closed. We don't want to encourage people to always flag most questions for dup-closure with random dup-targets. The requirement that the dup-target is used will result in some cases where the flagger just didn't find the best duplicate and doesn't get a reward, but if we don't prevent the case of mass flagging, then we'll have people abusing it. Just getting declined flags is not sufficient, because the most likely case is the flags expire, or are disputed, not declined.
– MakyenMay 11 at 17:01

@CrisLuengo I disagree. 15 rep is over-payment. It will lead to sockpuppetry of lame questions being posted solely to be dupe-closed. Also, it is typically FAR less work to copy a link into the dupe field than it is to craft a complete and educational answer. In fact, I am now thinking that 2 points is enough reward -- it is "approved" by the OP, a subsequent gold-hammerer, or by closing consensus. The OP's acceptance bonus should be void on accepting answer on their dupe question OR accepting a dupe closure -- this way there is no gaming for those points.
– mickmackusaMay 13 at 1:38

3

Yes often question are incorrectly marked as dupe - we must reward only correct dupe suggestions.
– giorgimMay 15 at 20:42

As a very experienced developer, I frequently see (or, indeed, ask) questions that get closed as duplicates referencing other questions that aren't actually duplicates; they're just similar, or on closely related aspects.

Certainly new-comers to the site may ask duplicates and mean exactly the other question, but experienced devs are often here looking for explanations or help with obscure edge cases, where subtle differences are really important.

I've observed a lot of questions quickly closed as duplicates by someone who either didn't bother to spend the time to understand the distinctions, or who just didn't understand the subject-matter well enough to recognise that there was a difference.

I don't think incentivising closing-as-duplicate is a good addition to that dynamic.

they're just similar, or on closely related aspects == duplicate. People need to understand that duplicate doesn't mean exact same question but a question that can help you identify your issue because it's related to the same issue you are facing.
– Temani AfifMay 10 at 15:39

109

I've observed a lot of questions quickly closed as duplicates by someone who either didn't bother to spend the time to understand the distinctions --> I"ve also observed a lot of user complaining about duplicate closure because they didn't bother to spend the time to read and understand the duplicate and to do the effort to edit their question to clearly explain why the duplicate wasn't suitable ... It's easy to play the victim role and to say the other are wrong. If you think the duplicate is wrong, you can perform some action to counter it
– Temani AfifMay 10 at 15:43

49

Reputation points are meant to be one of the "trust metrics" -- a way of knowing if a user is generally trustworthy as a Stack Exchange citizen. I am seeing very high rep users (far above 25K) who consistently answer questions that are very obviously basic dupes -- if there is a way for them to get "some green points" at the top right of their browser, maybe there is a glimmer of hope that they will stop bloating the site with redundant content. On the other hand, I probably have a hammer-to-answer ratio of ~20:1 on tags that I swim in but I get no trust points for my diligent service.
– mickmackusaMay 10 at 15:46

28

@TemaniAfif, FWIW the last time I saw this, the person was a moderator. And when I flagged it the community response was "well, he was a moderator, so he must know what he's talking about." Not a single response to my re-open request made any reference to the actual questions that had been closed; they gave every impression that they didn't bother looking, just assumed the mod was correct because they were a mod.
– BrondahlMay 10 at 16:25

76

@TemaniAfif "they're just similar, or on closely related aspects == duplicate." What? No .. that's not even close to true. Sure, some answers in tangential areas can help, especially when the questions are relatively simple questions, but many questions about minutiae aren't at all helped by answers in the same area but not about that specific issue.
– BrondahlMay 10 at 16:28

13

It sucks having your question closed as dupe incorrectly. Yeah, happens to me occasionally too. But its pretty easy to get that reversed it it really was an inaccurate closing - just a quick edit out comment usually does the trick. The number of times I’ve had my question incorrectly closed and I wasn’t able to get it reopened: zero
– wimMay 10 at 16:28

34

@TemaniAfif did you consider the fact that you can be wrong?. Yes, considered, carefully reflected, and examined the questions in detail. Concluded I wasn't. Especially since I wrote both the questions. But since I couldn't convince the community previously, I don't particularly expect to convince you here. In any case, me griping about a bad experience I had once, probably isn't a good contribution to this discussion.
– BrondahlMay 10 at 16:30

67

False, incorrect or lazy duping is one of the worst problems Stack Overflow suffers from.
– RouninMay 10 at 23:11

21

I agree that lazy duping is a scourge and one aspect of this site that makes it especially unwelcome to inexperienced users. It seems especially prevalent among more experienced users who don't take the time to put themselves in a new user's position and hammer questions because they can connect the dots between the question and dupe target even thought it's unlikely the OP can.
– Mark MeyerMay 10 at 23:43

13

@MarkMeyer: ".. who don't take the time to put themselves in a new user's position ..": how would you suggest handling a 'i tried but my variable names are not the same!' complaint?
– usr2564301May 11 at 9:28

9

@usr2564301 even worse when the user complain about the duplicate after he just accepted the same answer coming from that duplicate ...
– Temani AfifMay 11 at 10:53

10

@ispiro (1) edit the question to explain why it's not a duplicate (2) vote to reopen [the question will go to the review queue] ... and if you want you can also (3) politely ping the user who voted to close so he can review the edited question. .. (4) wait. I insist on waiting because many people think that SO is to solve urgent task but it's not. People will take time to review the question
– Temani AfifMay 11 at 15:54

9

@PeterDuniho - Your assertion and mine are not mutually exclusive. Yes, I agree with you that ill-crafted low-effort questions are a worse problem. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about well-crafted, high-effort questions which high rep users sometimes attempt to shut down because, before even reading the question properly they've already assumed it's "close enough" to a barely even tangentially related question they saw once.
– RouninMay 12 at 11:40

10

@PeterDuniho I'm glad that you've decided that my concern and Rounin's are not worthy of consideration. It's good to know where we stand.
– BrondahlMay 12 at 17:01

7

@PeterDuniho Also you've strawmanned "deliberately malicious" into your answer, despite no-one else having suggested that, to my knowledge. We aren't claiming the the high-rep users are doing it deliberately - rather that they genuinely believe that it's a dupe, but haven't actually put the effort in to confirm that.
– BrondahlMay 12 at 17:04

Accuracy

I like the idea of rewarding finding duplicates, but we need to think carefully about how we define accuracy and what level of accuracy is acceptable.

If we don't disincentivise inaccuracy, users may just try to get the reward with quantity rather than quality (proposing as duplicates many kind-of-similar but not necessarily duplicate questions).

A counter-argument would be assuming good faith, but we do have a problem with robo-reviewers, and this would presumably also apply to proposing duplicates.

There are also fewer checks in place to make sure the duplicates found by gold badge holders are accurate. But the good faith argument should apply to a greater extent to them, as they have made a significant amount of contributions and presumably care more about quality.

If we disincentivise inaccuracy, we could discourage users from proposing duplicates they know are duplicates, but that other people might disagree about.

Or users might just get frustrated due to people disagreeing (even if this happens very rarely for them overall) and stop proposing duplicates entirely.

Others might disagree that a question is a duplicate if:

They just don't agree that the questions are the same. This especially applies to the asker. In some cases they're wrong and the top-voted / accepted answer is almost word-for-word the same. In other cases it's just due to the unavoidable subjective nature of closure.

They just don't agree with duplicate closure in principle.

The duplicate target isn't hugely popular.

The duplicate target doesn't have an extensive set of answers (yet).

The duplicate has already received a few answers (possibly including one from the disagreeing user).

For determining accuracy, we should probably disregard questions that don't end up getting closed at all because it just wasn't seen by enough people. Although this might also demotivate duplicate finders.

Rewards: Big and risky versus "who cares?"

Another factor that should be carefully considered is what reward we're giving.

If the reward is too big, any possible exploit would become a huge problem.

If the reward is too small, it's mostly going to be a little added bonus for people who already find duplicates. But there will also be some users mostly doing it for the reward. I hypothesise that such users could, on average, care less about quality than the users we would've gotten had the reward been a bit greater. Just consider people robo-reviewing for barely any reward.

Although it is a bit more effort to find a duplicate than it is to just click a button, so maybe the same argument doesn't apply.

This has always been an argument of answering versus closing for me. People prefer answering because it gives them reputation (or they prefer a more personal response or want to expand their online presence). We can't give people the same amount of reputation for closing because that reward would just be way too big for a reputation system built around content over moderation. But maybe we only need a little increased incentive helps to close questions faster, which decreases the reward from answering them (especially if we can get it closed before they finish writing their answer) and creates a snowball effect to disincentivise answering duplicates.

On the other hand, our close vote queue is out of control, yet users do get rewarded for reviewing. Perhaps we should focus more on getting questions out of review (properly) before incentivising putting more questions in.

A side note on badges: I personally don't really consciously care about them. But when I got a gold badge for doing some review task or something, I just kind of lost motivation to keep doing it after that. So I might suggest considering something with no upper limit instead (although that would also have some downsides and doesn't really fit into the Stack Exchange system as it stands).

Very good points. I feel like, say, +15 for proposing a duplicate the asker accepts is worth considering. It's low risk (the asker surely wouldn't accept robo-dupes or lazy pile-ons that don't sole their problem), encourages good behaviour (+15 is a big deal for new users and may get some doing helpful work), and I think it feels right to say you get +15 for solving someone's problem by either writing a new answer or finding an old one. Of course some good dupes will get overlooked and not accepted by the asker, but that's just as true with non-accepted answers.
– user56reinstatemonica8May 11 at 23:48

Perhaps rejected dupe-flags should have an extra weight for purposes of flag-bans, and reopening the question should reject flags after the fact?
– HaemMay 12 at 12:07

3

@Haem That is an idea, but disincentivise inaccuracy has the risk of discouraging users from proposing good duplicates, as mentioned in my answer. Given the subjective nature of closure, I certainly wouldn't punish a close flagger or voter for a reopened question. That just means some people disagree, but other people needed to agree to get it closed in the first place. We shouldn't draw too many conclusions from that conflicting data. The question may also have been edited to fix any issues it had, meaning both were right. At most I would invalidate the flag, but I'm not even sure I'd do that
– Bernhard BarkerMay 12 at 13:45

I think that golden hammers should have an additional criteria beyond just scoring points for a given tag... the user must ALSO have a 1000 close vote queue reviews (and potentially a certain amount of re-open queue reviews -- but this queue is much smaller). This way we are ensuring that volunteers have extensive training on the art of closing for the right reasons and understanding the re-opening process before they get a hammer in their tool belt. This will also incentivize volunteerism in the queues (which is needed anyhow).
– mickmackusaMay 13 at 1:48

1

@mickmackusa It is a bit counter-intuitive that moderation privileges are unlocked through non-moderation tasks, but I think it's probably fine for gold hammers. That only allows for duplicate closure, which only requires that you're able to tell whether 2 questions are asking the same thing, for which having domain knowledge might be sufficient (and potentially better than moderation knowledge). Rewarding someone for doing something that's largely unchecked seems a bit dangerous, but maybe gold badge holders can be trusted enough for that (but maybe don't give them reputation for it).
– Bernhard BarkerMay 13 at 8:55

4

So what can be done about 100k+ rep users who consistently answer basic questions that they KNOW are duplicates? I have pleaded with a few in the php tag to close duplicates, but they simply refuse to get on board. They must be trying catch Mr. Skeet or something.
– mickmackusaMay 13 at 10:21

@mickmackusa I think giving them less power to close things would probably hurt more than it would help in terms of getting them to close things. I'm sceptical about whether we can fully fix this given how reputation works and that both the staff and a large number of users seem to be happy with how things are. This would be much easier to fix if one were to design a site from scratch with this as the guiding principle.
– Bernhard BarkerMay 13 at 10:57

I just want to chime in as a n00b here -- a user type I'm sure makes up quite a large portion of the SO userbase.

I have had questions closed as duplicates that aren't actually duplicates. It is very frustrating when I take an hour or two scouring S.O. before I post, then again when you type in a title and it gives recommendations, reading through all of those similar posts because they seem similar, but in reality are not what I'm looking for (perhaps only determinable if you actually read all of my question and all of the potential duplicate), and then somebody comes along after I spent another 30 minutes formatting my question in a way that would be easy to read, clearly defines my problem, even how it is different from other posts... and they mark it as a duplicate of a question I've already seen (taking who knows how little time to do so), a question that is not a duplicate, one which may be similar, but simply put... not similar enough, making it a different question -- unwilling to re-open it because they simply disagree (Even more frustrating when they are not willing to give reasoning)

And now the two hours I spent searching for an answer before my post, and the 30 minutes spent formatting my post have been completely wasted

You can already see in a lot of the replies to this mega-thread that there are people chomping at the bit to gain more reputation for closing as duplicates, there are people frustrated at the closing of non-duplicate questions as duplicates, and there are people frustrated at the thousands (an exaggeration imo) of duplicates to a single question. The only option is to accept that all are true. This will for sure help to mitigate actual duplicates, but the cost is too high imo.

I'm not a 10 year user or anything but I don't think that's necessary simply to know there are users out there reputation hunting, and that they will be more inclined to close a question as a duplicate by headline reading (or basically not fully reading both questions).. Who's going to question the close? Surely there is nothing a newer user can do against a Gold (example), and surely we are not so blind as to say all Gold users are good, thorough people. This is the gray area.. So...

I think it's important to ask:

Why are we closing things as duplicates?

To which I see a simple answer: because it reduces bloat, making things easier to find, again, by consolidating information. It obviously makes total sense.

BUT: Community members should be ASSISTING the closure as duplicate, not forcing it, especially not without discussion which is not something that could be easily coded. Perhaps an "I agree this is a duplicate" response to a close request

Imagine a S.O. where if a question seems like a duplicate: the one who believes it to be so (responder) can comment on the post-to-be-closed and say "hey, this seems like a duplicate to [link to question]"

If the original poster gives no response or agrees, the responder can close the question as a duplicate. If the original poster responds and says anything to the effect of "this is not a duplicate" the post should not be closed as a duplicate UNLESS the two can agree on a solution and that it is in-fact a duplicate. Someone is going to want a solution and the other is going to want the reputation, so there's aligning incentives to come to an agreement. One should not be able to overpower the other. It may be a small portion of the userbase, but people already abuse that power, and it is my opinion that this could exacerbate that problem while also giving off a sense of carelessness towards the user experience of less experienced programmers (again, which I believe to be a decent portion of the userbase based on watching the recently asked questions feed).

I've had people close my questions as duplicate, link me a "duplicate" -- that I've already linked myself within the original post as not being a solution then the one who closed my ticket sends me a different link (basically backing out of the stance that the first is a duplicate) which is ALSO not a duplicate.. and now we're in a deadlock where I, the person looking for an answer, have wasted my time and received nothing but "I don't care about your question", essentially making my user experience on Stack Overflow very poor and extremely frustrating. I don't think these questions remain public... Meaning all of the higher-echelon users saying this doesn't happen a lot.. perhaps they are saying that because they can't actually see how often it's happening. Perhaps they are unwilling to admit there are silver/gold/etc users like them, but that some are actually abusing that power... either way, I am 100% sure it is happening and is a very memorable bad experience.

P.S.: I see some posts on here saying "similar == duplicate" and that is just outrageous. We work in a world of edge cases and tiny yet important distinctions.. This call, imo, is not the responder's to make, at least not without representation from the original poster. And.. to be frank.. not all users are coding veterans capable of extrapolating answers from vaguely similar questions where a user was looking to do something else.

"and they mark it as a duplicate of a question I've already seen" I stopped reading right here this answer, because it seems that it cannot be repeated enough: you need to include any relevant information, even information that you found to be not applicable to your case. You need to show your work, all of it.
– BraiamMay 15 at 15:08

26

@Braiam what you've just said, is that it's okay for someone to close a non-duplicate as a duplicate, because there wasn't a link to that specific question, which again is a non-duplicate. People doing what you're doing, not reading the whole thing... assuming.. that's what's causing the issue in the first place. IF YOU would have kept reading, you would've seen the part where I suggest a discussion of that before closing the ticket. You would've also seen where I did actually do exactly that and was met with the same thing.. a closed as duplicate of a post i linked in my original question.
– James BMay 15 at 15:15

12

"is that it's okay for someone to close a non-duplicate as a duplicate, because there wasn't a link to that specific question" no, it's not ok for you to withhold information that would help people to identify duplicates more accurately. We are not you, we don't know anything but what you show in your question.
– BraiamMay 15 at 15:18

12

The code of conduct also applies to you, remember, they are the same rules for everyone. They are not your shield nor your sword. If you still believe I've run foul of the CoC, you may just flag the post that you believe infringing.
– BraiamMay 15 at 15:20

11

Did you explain why your question is not a duplicate of the other similar question you previously read? If you read and understand the other question, then the question you need answered really is about the part that's different. If you can be specific about what the difference is and why the answer to the other question doesn't work in your case, then your question will be useful. Making an edit like this will automatically put your question in the reopen queue.
– Don't PanicMay 15 at 15:43

8

If your question is truly different, you can edit to clarify the discrepancies and then have it reopened fairly easily (at least that's been my experience). Can you show us some examples of your questions which were closed as duplicate that you've edited to explain the difference and were still not able to get reopened, please?
– wimMay 15 at 15:47

@JamesB like many here, you are missunderstanding duplicate and you think it's a we have closed your question, go away! you will never get your answer! but it's not. You edit to clarify your issue and your question can be reopened easily and you can get your answer.
– Temani AfifMay 15 at 16:14

6

yes, you had a chance to get a reopen but based on your edits I would change the duplicate to another one more suitable related to the box-sizing issue
– Temani AfifMay 15 at 16:20

10

@JamesB Also, try to remember while you may feel it isn't a duplicate others may disagree. I've lost count of the number of times an OP has fervently denied their question is a duplicate but in 9/10 cases the answer they end up with is exactly the same. I would suggest using the site:stackoverflow.com search prefix in google to get better search results rather than trying to use the Stack Overflow search.
– LankymartMay 15 at 16:55

39

@Braiam "I stopped reading right here this answer, because..." OMG, seriously!? In a meta thread that is literally a discussion about people making incorrect actions because they don't read the questions fully and properly, so decided to A) do the same, rude, thing and then B) brag about having done that in your first response. You are literally the problem we are complaining about!
– BrondahlMay 16 at 11:20

12

@JamesB I would say welcome, but I see you've already been ... welcomed ... by others. As it happens I agree with you, but independently to that can I thank you for such a thoroughly articulated contribution to this thread. It's clear that you put the effort in to read a lot of the rest of this mega-thread and to include in your post here everything that would be relevant to the discussion. I regret that others give the impression that they opted not to read it all. It's fairly clear that you put a similar effort into the questions that you ask on SO itself, too. I hope ... 1 / 2 ctd.
– BrondahlMay 16 at 11:28

17

@Braiam I tried to do an honest attempt to read this answer argument. No. You didn't. That would have involved reading the whole answer, which you actively brag about not having done.
– BrondahlMay 16 at 11:43

9

I have read this answer in its entirety, and a good portion of what is being proposed is already in place. When I vote to close as a duplicate, a comment is automatically generated, asking "Does this answer your question? [link to proposed duplicate]". The problem with the discussion part is that it doesn't scale. SO gets thousands of new questions a day, and a decent percentage of them are duplicates. Having 1:1 conversations for each of those closures just doesn't scale to the amount of traffic SO gets.
– Heretic MonkeyMay 17 at 12:54

15

Regarding rep hunting, I assure you there are just as many people (if not more) hunting for rep answering duplicate questions as there would theoretically be those hunting for rep closing duplicate questions. Every duplicate question I see in [javascript] usually has several answers by the time I vote for a duplicate. A duplicate, mind you, that asks the same question in the same way, with the same (sometimes identical) answers.
– Heretic MonkeyMay 17 at 12:59

My take is that questions which are widely regarded as dupes ought to all appear on the same page.

The canonical question can be displayed at the top of that page, the dupe questions may comprise a closed accordion beneath the canonical question.

All the answers to all the questions then appear below the question accordion, ranked in upvote order (with a user option to re-order by newest first etc.).

Then there will be one canonical page with all the questions and all the answers.

Yes, there could then be points and / or a series of badges for users who successfully add a dupe question (in the wild) to a canonical question page - helping to make it the page on Stack Overflow to go to for that question and very (very) similar questions.

Perhaps then we wouldn't see so many Google searches returning 4, 6, 12 etc. Stack Overflow results, all (apparently) answering the same or very similar questions.

I like the idea in theory - but I'm concerned about screen realestate... there are some questions with literally hundreds of duplicates, and I don't see much value in having to scroll through all of that to get to the actual answers. The other concern is that many duplicates have a different focus, (and presumably all of them a different example code, if any) which could be jarring when merging answers.
– ShadowMay 11 at 3:04

1

I agree, @Shadow - this approach might work better when there are up to 8 or 9 dupes, but less well when there are 80 or 90 dupes. My amendment (assuming this is not too elaborate) would be to enable questions to be voted off the accordion (ie. deleted), such that there remain a number of questions on the accordion but not examples which are virtually word-to-word identical repeats of questions already on the accordion. (Also - you don't have to scroll - it's an accordion).
– RouninMay 11 at 8:47

5

If they really are duplicates (as opposed to just similar), there should only be one set of answers. If each question has its own set of answers, there will be a large amount of duplication on that page. But if you combine all the answers into one set, this may be confusing, as each question is slightly different and any given answer may not really make sense outside of the context of that specific question. Note that moderators currently have the ability to merge questions to combine their answers into one page, but this isn't done often or automatically for the reason mentioned above.
– Bernhard BarkerMay 11 at 9:28

3

I think keeping separate pages might help people find their way here through Google, as people are more likely to find at least one of the duplicates by searching for different terms. Matching the title ranks much higher than matching on something that just appears somewhere on the page. And maybe the canonical would rank higher if more pages link to it (although this might not matter so much if all those links are on the same domain). But I'd agree that the current process isn't ideal and I'm not an expert on SEO.
– Bernhard BarkerMay 11 at 9:45

@Dukeling to my knowledge, it already works that way. Keywords from duplicate posts will link to the duplicate target I'm pretty sure.
– ShadowMay 11 at 10:56

4

The lack of a dedicated page for canonical questions despite SO's recommendation to close dupes against those questions has something that's confused me since I opened my account.
– SomethingDarkMay 12 at 0:32

8

@Rounin At the risk of repeating the argument happening on my answer, I disagree that "similar" questions should consistently be treated the same as "duplicate". The times that I Google something and see 6-8 SO answers, I tend to open all of them and read through them and find that they are mostly subtley different and that of those answers suggested maybe 2 of them offer different ways for me to solve my situation. Note: not 2 are the same, or duplicate, but that 2 different questions, with different answers addressing different parts of my problem happen to both be applicable to me.
– BrondahlMay 12 at 14:01

2

StackOverflow is very fond of telling users that they have XY problems, but that's because problems can usually be legitimately fixed at different levels, thus a fix at one level can easily fix multiple a problem in multiple different scenarios at higher levels.
– BrondahlMay 12 at 14:04

3

... I disagree that "similar" questions should consistently be treated the same as "duplicate" Perhaps it's necessary to more explicitly distinguish between questions asked by new users and those asked by experienced users? If a new user is asking a similar question then it's probably actually a dupe, whereas when experienced users do the same then there's a higher chance that they're actually drawing some subtle distinction
– BrondahlMay 12 at 14:06

2

I like your last point and that would be easy to automate - Stack Overflow could require more dupe votes for questions posted by higher-rep users and fewer dupe votes for questions posted by lower-rep users.
– RouninMay 12 at 18:53

1

@Rounin: In all cases where there are legitimately "80-90 dupes" (or even more realistically 10+), most of them are low-quality for other reasons and should be closed as low-quality (no basic research, unclear, asking someone to do homework for them, etc.), not as dupe.
– R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICEMay 13 at 15:51

1

Like Brondahl, I am a voracious researcher -- I don't dare to ask a new question until I have exhausted SO's knowledge stores. By having a site which is bloated with so much redundant content (duplicate pages and/or duplicated answers on the same page), this costs me (John Q. Researcher) time. In terms of work output, this "time cost" is directly converted to "monetary cost" for me, my employer, and/or my client. So I would like to point out that any redundance in content should be stomped out, not embraced. If I need something, I want to be here for a good time, not a long time.
– mickmackusaMay 17 at 9:02

1

@mickmackusa well, I've proposed for some time now that when a question has over x amount of duplicate questions, the system should just autodelete them.
– BraiamMay 17 at 12:12

1

This would be very helpful as a user, because it would allow me to see many different formulations of the same problem and different slight variations of the answer. And if any aren't actually dupes, they should stand out like a sore thumb. So it seems like a win-win if designed smartly from a UX standpoint.
– bobMay 19 at 12:28

If I do all sorts of research and legitimately can't find any resources to help me (which is rare, since SO has so much content already), then I'm going to ask a question instead of spending hours and hours of my time (on the clock, so it's also my employer's time) scouring every possible question on the site. I really only have the time to search for all relevant keywords and reword my search query a dozen times. That already takes a while, especially if there's a bunch of tangential questions that aren't quite the same, but are in the same ballpark.

For example, today I was trying to figure out how to create div in HTML with concave sides. Something like border-radius but for the edges, not the corners. But I searched for an hour and could only find 3000 variations of the same question about border-radius.

If I ask a question about this, and someone finds a legitimate duplicate that I missed with answers that can help me, then they were just as helpful to me as a helpful answer.

If I got a very helpful answer to my initial question, I'd mark it as the official answer with the green checkmark. I'd like to do the same thing to anyone who finds me a legitimate duplicate.

Duplicates should be treated as answers. I should be able to mark one of them with the green checkmark, and the duplicate finder should get the same rewards as an answerer would have.

If we reward duplicate finding more than answering, we encourage roboduplicates. If we reward duplicate finding less than answering, we encourage content fragmentation. So the answer is simple to me: just make them equivalent.

Another important aspect to consider is that people in a rush (such as myself) don't often read through the comments to the question or the answers. I know it's probably bad, but I'd assume a lot of users here are like me: I'll just skim the question and scroll quickly to the accepted answer and see if any of the info there helps me. I might notice there's a duplicate mark, but I typically ignore it because there might be something valuable in the answers below. If the accepted answer was a link to the duplicate question though, I would be more inclined, as just your average user, to go down that route in my research. Right now, if the accepted answer to that question isn't helpful, I'm not going to go check the question it's a duplicate of because that's probably a dead end. Maybe the help I need is just on the duplicate target, but I'm not going there because it's not prominent enough. Treating it as an answer would make SO easier to use as a research tool.

That's actually a very nice idea. Leave the close system as is, but allow op mark a duplicate as accepted and give 25rep to the finder. No rep for wrong duplicates, good incentive to really search for correct ones. Like it.
– BDLMay 28 at 8:35

1

If this goes, then I suggest that the reputation given is only once. There should be no voting options on the duplicate find. The only thing that bugs me in this is that answers on the duplicate target may not even have any votes. And perhaps none of them are accepted. When that is the case the reputation given to the duplicate finder is greater than the reputation given to the answeres. This may not be a problem though, as the votes on the target may accumulate after the find. Another thing to consider is: What if the finder is also the one that gave the accepted answer on the target?
– ScratteMay 28 at 8:56

1

Duplicates should be treated as answers --> this is actually the case because isntead of writing a new one we are redirecting to an existing one ... I should be able to mark one of them with the green checkmark --> simply vote on the target question. As a duplicate closer I don't really need to get a Rep for duplicates that are easy to find for me and hard to find for OP. The main purpose of duplicate is that people with more experience knows the duplicate and can easily find them. We won't spend hours finding duplicates
– Temani AfifMay 28 at 12:41

@Scratte About your first point, the asker would be able to accept the duplicate finder's post as the accepted answer. So if the duplicate target has no relevant or helpful info, the asker just shouldn't accept their post as an answer. Per your second point, where the finder also answered the target question: they answered two people's questions, so shouldn't they get rep for two answers? They were twice as helpful.
– Jaden BaptistaMay 28 at 16:12

3

@TemaniAfif Who is the site for? It's not only for experienced users. A couple rep points to you is nothing, to me, it's a decent percentage of my total rep points. SO is built so that anybody can find information, so if I do my research and still ask a question, then closing as duplicate is just as helpful as an answer. Why shouldn't it be treated like one?
– Jaden BaptistaMay 28 at 16:16

you can get Rep from closing as duplicate like I detailed in my answer but this should have a limit. Like when you edits question, after 2K you no more get Rep. I don't think I have to earn reputation each time I close a css centring question (examples of question I face everyday that I close within few seconds)
– Temani AfifMay 28 at 16:19

@JadenBaptista I see some potential gaming with self-answered Questions for the sole purpose to getting the answer accepted multiple times. What if this duplicate target is itself a duplicate of another Question? There are also some Questions that are closed with multiple targets. Should the gold-hammer be awarded reputation for closing them or should it only be awarded by the Question asker? While you seem to be interested in finding an answer and willing to put effort into that, there are a lot of users that refuses the duplicate target only because it's not tailored to their specifics.
– ScratteMay 28 at 16:23

@Scratte Unfortunately that's the drawback of a reputation-based system. Can't you create a bunch of self-answered duplicate questions and "earn" a bunch of rep points now? Also, if it were up to me, I'd encourage anybody with a meaningful, updated answer to answer only on the one open question. Then you would have all the info in one place and you'd (on paper) never have multiple duplicate targets. Though if duplicate suggestions are treated as answers, then as the asker, I would only be able to choose one to accept, likely the most relevant to me.
– Jaden BaptistaMay 28 at 17:31

2

@TemaniAfif In that scenario, you're helping tons of people all the time with their CSS centering questions. Not that you need any more rep for doing it, but you've been just as helpful to them as if you answered their question directly, so why not afford the answer rep reward regardless of how many total rep points you have? You've earned it, whether you need them is irrelevant in my opinion at least.
– Jaden BaptistaMay 28 at 17:33

1

There is no reputation gain from a self-answered Question. Unless other people find my Question/Answer pair useful. But if I had a pair and I used is as a target, then perhaps the person asking the duplicate would find it useful. I would imagine however that this would be more prevalent if there's 25 reputation points to be gained just by suggesting a duplicate target. I don't think your idea is bad, though, but I think 25 reputation points is too much. It should not be more than an upvote.
– ScratteMay 28 at 17:39

1

@Scratte That's fair, I didn't realize self-answered questions were no rep points. But my logic was that duplicate finders = answerers, so then if someone asks question and answers it themselves by finding a duplicate, that's no points. And just in case I misspoke, the asker wouldn't be accepting an answer from the duplicate target. The asker would be accepting the duplicate suggestion. Like I would post an answer on the question saying "this is a duplicate of stackoverflow.com/xyz, check there", or some more formalized way of doing it. The asker would accept that.
– Jaden BaptistaMay 28 at 17:46

Re "I didn't realize self-answered questions were no rep points": That was conditional ("Unless other people find my question/answer pair useful [by voting it up]") - that is, it depends on the voting (self-answered questions are not special, except they are perfectly acceptable and even encouraged (unfortunately, some people think they are a rep-farming scheme - they are not (in most cases). It is a negative side effect of reputation points envy)).
– Peter MortensenMay 29 at 13:26

@jscs It seemed like a pretty obvious idea, so I figured a few other people had thought of it before. I might've missed it, but I don't think I saw it on this page, so I figured I'd explain the rationale that led me to that idea myself.
– Jaden BaptistaMay 31 at 20:08

I do wonder if it would be more beneficial to discourage people from answering duplicate questions by removing any reputation gain from a question that is closed as a duplicate before an answer has been accepted.

Personally, I'm burnt out from trying to find questions that aren't duplicates and show some sort of effort from the OPs attempts at answering it themselves. Reputation means absolutely nothing if it is just collected from answering the same ~10 questions.

I've seen many duplicates that are answered, with acceptance, before the duplicate has been identified. This is especially true when questioners get the answer and accept it immediately. Then I come along and vote to close as a duplicate and they answer the comment "Does this answer your question?" with "I already have an answer" :(.
– Heretic MonkeyMay 12 at 19:07

14

we should focus on deletion to get rid of this. If we cannot be fast at closing let's at least delete the question later. Maybe instruct the Roomba to automatically delete 1000nth duplicate
– Temani AfifMay 12 at 19:27

@HereticMonkey - Yes, but i'd worry that long standing answers would be abused by this by being set as duplicates of newer lesser answers.
– SayseMay 12 at 19:39

4

I sometimes see a question closed as a duplicate where (IMO) the new question is "better" and the answers (prior to closure) on the new question are current, where the old question which remains open has answers that, while they work, use outdated techniques. Sometimes there are edits to answers on the old question, but they often end up reading as an aside; "btw, here's how to do that in Java8+"
– Stephen PMay 15 at 0:33

1

@StephenP - I see that too and ideally the newer answers should be added to the existing duplicate (and also why I personally sort answers by newest rather than votes).
– SayseMay 15 at 13:18

2

"before an answer has been accepted." This is going to lead to comical "Hurry up, accept my answer!" spam in fishy questions.
– Michael - Where's Clay ShirkyMay 18 at 19:23

@Michael - Where's Clay Shirky - that happens anyway with the classic comment or answer signature "if this answer helped you...", the difference is that theres a 15 minute period where I believe that most questions were closed as duplicates, or at least they were at one point when moderation was appreciated by SO.
– SayseMay 20 at 6:14

My measure of accuracy is not "did many users agree on the target" it's "did the target help the OP"

I think it's an interesting take to involve the OP in rewarding duplicate finding. If the OP could "accept" the best duplicate from the selection of candidate duplicates found by the community if one did in fact help them it would be a much stronger confirmation that the question is a duplicate. It could also give the OP a role in rejecting a set of duplicates if the community incorrectly identified the question as a duplicate.

This would help sidestep some of the risks with incentivizing duplicate finding:

Sometimes questions are incorrectly flagged as duplicates, and this significantly lowers the threshold for later users to VTC but it is challenging to get the community to re-engage with more obscure questions.

Sometimes existing questions with answers are so old that the answers are no longer relevant but new answers to them don't properly bubble up to replace them or the OP is no longer around or willing to accept an up-to-date answer. Sometimes it's also nice to get the same answers again to confirm that the 10 year old answer is still the correct answer.

Sometimes existing questions have flat out incorrect answers (here's a great example: https://superuser.com/q/1083624/8144) but are still closed as duplicates. New questions need to be able to replace these.

There are already aggressive, problem users that actively try to find duplicates without properly reading both questions. --> can you proove the evidence of this? I hope you aren't saying this because you had one single question closed as dupe
– Temani AfifMay 13 at 12:46

1

@TemaniAfif It's an observation I have about other questions I've seen, and I'm not going to call out specific users (administrators) that I've observed to be doing this.
– EricMay 13 at 13:49

2

You should because it's easy to blame and to accuse other with no justification (like everyone is doing here ...)
– Temani AfifMay 13 at 13:51

2

@TemaniAfif Just because your experience is different than mine doesn't necessitate that I prove my experience. I'm more interested in my second and third points, in any case. As an side, I find it interesting that I'm flagged as a new contributor since my only meta posts are so old that they must have been deleted.
– EricMay 13 at 13:52

Asking op is maybe not the best option. Actually, I see several problems: 1) low-quality duplicates are often produced by users who ask one question and never come back. They rarely respond to comments or anything else, so it's unlikely that they would accept the duplicate even if it solved their problem 2) ops disagree that there question is a duplicate because "it's not the same question" although there is a 1-1 copy of the same answer on both questions.
– BDLMay 13 at 16:05

3) for the canonical duplicates (what is a NPE/NRE, what are linker errors) the dupe target doesn't answer the question directly. But it doesn't make sense to answer all those questions separately. ops already often disagree when their question is closed as a duplicate of one of those.
– BDLMay 13 at 16:06

@BDL True, there is risk with involving the OP, but we already do that with the ability to accept answers. The community doesn't rule everything. There would have to be limits where the community could overrule the OP, but I think the current system is too heavily skewed towards the community and doesn't account for whether the OP felt the community actually helped them or not.
– EricMay 13 at 16:07

1

@Eric: Maybe because helping op is not the main goal of this site? The goal is to build a repository of questions and answers that help more people than just op.
– BDLMay 13 at 16:09

@BDL I would argue it's a problem if the canonical duplicate is not a good fit for a specific question. We might need a way to point to the canonical question for the "teaching a man to fish" answers but there's still value in the "feeding the man" answer if it represents a specific, answerable problem.
– EricMay 13 at 16:10

2

@BDL SO always has a dual role: help the OP (accepted answers) and help the community (top-voted answers). You won't get great questions without people asking the questions actually getting useful answers to their questions.
– EricMay 13 at 16:15

Badges – good, as long as thresholds are high enough for them to be a long term goal (maybe except for the bronze badge that should be given right for the first duplicate found, like with the flagging badges).

Reputation gain – bad, too much gamification, new users may start to abuse it even for 2 rep. And having a question closed as an inaccurate duplicate that doesn't solve the problem asked will be very disappointing.

let's not forget that a duplicate need at least 3 votes or a gold badge owner or the OP accepting the duplicate so we cannot really abuse with random duplicates because no one will accept it.
– Temani AfifMay 11 at 22:38

They won't be "random duplicates", they'll be seemingly accurate, but only on the first sight. There was this problem even when there were five votes required to close a question, now there are only three. "Roboreviewers" are already a thing, people tend to think that the one nominating to close had a good reason for doing this and won't dig deep. Gamifying duplicate finding will attract "robodupers", it's for sure. I believe that to minimize it the achievements should be only long term, like we have with flags now.
– userMay 12 at 13:50

The consern raised is actually very valid. Is there some kind of ban for users who choose wrong duplicate? I am fun of finding duplicates, but I am occasionally making mistakes, never get ban or anything. Someone may just link random question (mathing one or two word), not good. From other point of view closed question can be re-opened, maybe it's not as harmful. Though from my experience I vote-open way less often than vote-close.
– SinatrMay 25 at 7:39

Is this change already live? I'd expect to have at least a Superduper if not a Thor badge, but I can't find any of them on my profile. Also, since one can add multiple duplicates now, does this count as 1 duplicate or multiple duplicates? I think that when single-handedly closing a question, it's still better to leave a comment than leaving none, because dupes are often produced when users do not understand existing answers and then just ask the same question again, which may refer to the question it dupes, while demanding a more simple explanation.

I mean, it might be helpful when inexperienced programmers could flag Q&A for difficult to understand (preferable demanding information, what they don't understand), putting them into a queue, where people could leave answers with an easier explanation... below the same original question. In order to reduce the demand for creating dupes in such a case.

The change is not implemented (yet). At this stage it's just an idea being proposed on meta, to gauge whether the community agrees with that or not. Votes are showing that community strongly agrees, so hopefully we will see the feature live sometime in 6-8 weeks!
– wimMay 24 at 17:23

That's an interesting proposal, but it basically means that duplicates don't close the question anymore. This would require a fair bit of reworking the user interface to reasonably show multiple duplicates. Also, I still remember documentationSE or whatever it was called, so my trust in this kind of experiment is limited.
– EOFMay 24 at 9:36

Thanks for the reply. I see that this idea is somewhat controversial. And I did not solve how this should be represented in the UI. I never meant that it should not close the question. But for the UI: Should it add a synthetic answer, that people can vote on? But at least it would allow to gather data on the accuracy of the duplicates.
– Johannes KuhnMay 24 at 17:14

I don't want that feature. Simply. But none of the answers saying "No" succeed at finding a good enough reason. I think I found one.

If that would be the only one close-reason what rewards with reputation points - expect it to be abused. It become sole choice for majority:

No more "too broad" votes, people will just choose duplicates they think are the most suitable.

No more "needs more details" votes, people will again just try to find duplicate which they think may help.

Other close reasons? Find duplicate.

I think I will personally do so. Why not? The question gets closed. Why not getting some points in process? Right?

So unless all vote-closes will get buffed somehow buffing solely rewarding duplicates is the problem.

Do we need a duplicate finding review queue now? Probably. Do we need a new ban for posting wrong duplicates? Sure..

Until now I was finding duplicates way more often than I answered questions. And I don't need badges/reputations for this. I'd benefit from a better search or some new way of finding canonical duplicats (those daily NullReferenceException, pass data from class to class, etc.). Please spend manhours more on those topics first.

Not all questions have a duplicate. If you systematically dupe-close questions with incorrect targets, I'm sure you'll run into a wall rather quickly.
– CerbrusMay 25 at 8:08

@Cerbrus, I will not search for correct duplicate, just matching few words of title. What do you call a wall? Is there a ban already exists for posting wrong duplicates?
– SinatrMay 25 at 8:09

The closure behaviour you're describing would be considered abuse of the system, and as such, simply result in a ban. I'm also a little confused how all those downvoted answers here complaining it would just reward incorrect dupe closures aren't the same as your answer.
– CerbrusMay 25 at 8:12

@Cerbrus, is it auto-ban or given manually? I guess latter and you will need much more moderator hours after the change. You say there are already answers like mine? Which ones? Whos mention already what other close reasons need points too?
– SinatrMay 25 at 8:15

4

Does it matter? A very simple solution to this problem would be to just revert the rep gain is a dupe is re-opened. I'm not even convinced this will have a massive impact on the system, and dupe closures can never come near being as rewarding as answering obvious duplicates. Look at all the answers expecting people to close for the reputation... Most of the downvoted answers here are just that.
– CerbrusMay 25 at 8:18

1

You can try to close with random duplicate but you forget few points: (1) you have the power of one vote and the other need to agree with you (I doubt they will do for a random duplicate) (2) The REP system will not work forever, it should have a limit and it's meant to encourage new users to search for duplicates. Like edits, when you reach an X amount of Rep you no more earn from finding duplicates.
– Temani AfifMay 25 at 15:45

Quite aside from the issue of superfluous and inaccurate and misleading close-duplicates, which is infuriating.... (Penalties please!!)

There's also the problem of code rot. Questions that were asked many years ago may no longer reflect the current state of major development environments. questions that were asked and answered with respect to Android 2.0 may no longer be relevant to Android 10, for example.

This is increasingly becoming a problem as Stackoverflow ages. Answers to common questions are frequently just plain wrong, because the answers have not aged gracefully.

Superficially, you would think that a correct answer to an old question would eventually bubble to the top of the answer list. But I'm not at all sure that perfectly brilliant up-to-date answers are able to overtake a set of answers with 700 upvotes (none which occured in the last decade).

Personally I don't think you're doing us a favor with the Close-Dup process. I think it causes more harm than good. It would be much better to gradually age and deprecate old answers, allowing them to be superceded by more recent and more up-to-date answers.

Q&A about Android 2.0 are not duplicates of Q&A about Android 7.0, as long as you explain, within the body of the new question, that you reviewed the answers to this existing question (link), but they are no longer applicable to Android 7.0. (They are, of course, duplicates if nothing has changed and the old answers still apply. That's why expertise is required to vote-to-close.) Furthermore, I think you're vastly underestimating the power of new answers to overtake old answers. I've personally had many of my answers do exactly that, and I've seen many, many more posted by others do that.
– Cody Gray♦May 22 at 5:51

Sure. But the problem is not so much having MY question close-dup-ed as it is trying to find a reasonable existing answer on the site. It's not like Android questions are labeled "Android 2.0". StackExchange is not aging well. And the close-dup policy aggravates the problem. It would be better to close duplicates far less agressively, and give new questions search priority over old questions. .
– Robin DaviesMay 22 at 6:03

1

Unfortunately, SO doesn't control external search engines, and can't tell them to prioritize one link over another. I do agree with you though - code rot is a problem, but cutting off dupe voting only causes solution fragmentation. New questions where old solutions don't apply anymore are an exception to dupe voting IIRC. There's always bounties to draw attention to the more up to date answers
– ZoeMay 22 at 8:20

3

I haven't observed these "aging" problems that you refer to. Perhaps my experience is different. I don't always use the trendy, new technology. I don't have that luxury. My code needs to be robust and portable. But either way, that discussion has little to do with duplicates. There are ways that SO could address this problem, including weighting dates in sort orders and no longer pinning the accepted answer to the top (which would allow new, community-vetted answers to float all the way to the top, even with old questions). But fragmentation of answers is not the solution.
– Cody Gray♦May 22 at 8:33

@CodyGray : Android is a "trendy new technology"?! I mean it's lovely that you choose to play with a language that (used to) limit itself to updates once per decade. I work professionally, in C#, Java, Android, .net, C#, WPF, all of which are evolving quickly, and all of which I have PROFESSIONAL responsibility to keep current with. And all of these languages and environments have problems with out-of-date answers. Which seem to be increasing as StackOverflow gets older.
– Robin DaviesMay 24 at 12:31

Isn't that a yes argument? If the search is bad, shouldn't we than motivate people to point askers to the duplicate (and not easily findable) questions? And in general, what has the poor search to do with rewarding duplicate finders or not?
– BDLMay 27 at 8:28

@CodyGray A great rhetorical question! Because in some of country in this world, Google is a not exist site. -"Why not Bing?" -Are you joking me?
– FlithorMay 27 at 8:51

2

As far as I understand, the country that blocks Google also blocks Stack Overflow.
– Cody Gray♦May 27 at 9:26

@CodyGray In fact, no. It's just that Stackoverflow uses some Google APIs, which makes peoples difficult for those countries to access SO normally. If SO can solve this problem, it would be better. (I don't like the media that will mislead you.)
– FlithorMay 27 at 9:40

That sounds like a political problem on the government's side, it's not SO's fault that that government chooses to block one of the most useful tools known to man. I'm not sure why it should be up to SO to solve that problem. But that's a whole different can of worms not related to this answer.
– Davy MMay 27 at 21:31

@DavyM Well... SO has did it... I am a bit hindsight. So, why do you think this is unnecessary? It is not difficult to visit SO now, but it is still difficult to use SO search to find what users need.
– FlithorMay 28 at 8:27

3

I'm of the opinion that the company could indeed seek to improve Stack Overflow's own search capabilities, because after all, that's the engine used by various portions of the site ("ask a question" form, "related questions", ...). This line of research is probably less interesting on their perspective, or just out of reach given the difficulty of the problem. With that said, the two concerns appear to be orthogonal. One would simply complement the other.
– E_net4 is downhaustedMay 28 at 10:04

2

Better searching and better duplicate matching are both ways to help people find the answers they need (not to mention better searching would make it easier to find duplicate targets too). One shouldn't preclude the other.
– John MontgomeryMay 28 at 18:20

That's just gonna encourage more dupes (with more dupe closing no doubt), as they are rewarding. If there is a beef with high-rep users, why not focus on penalizing them instead? There are many options available: report them, dock their rep (beyond what they get from responding to dupes), or even suspension. High-rep users have nothing to lose responding to possibly duped content - this should be fixed.

Users aren't going to get suspended for answering obvious dupes. Even if we don't like it, it isn't a violation of site policy or anything, and there's a potential slippery slope there for punishing people who may have acted in good faith because the dupe wasn't as obvious to them. Same for docking their rep - as an individual user you can do that by downvoting them, but it's often cancelled out by the upvotes from people who don't care about the site quality.
– John MontgomeryMay 21 at 17:20

2

@JohnMontgomery site policy can always be updated or re-interpreted to suit the purpose. If duplicates are really such a problem, then the users that contribute to the problem need to be addressed. I don't care about the duplicates, just pointing out that repwhoring cannot be fixed with more repwhoring.
– prusswanMay 22 at 12:41

I am fairly new, so I also might not know already available flag options. but if some well-rewarded users state that "mark as duplicates" is actually also valid to mark just similar questions, I do not see why I should not state some unimportant words here as well.

Warning: when you read this, it might be redundant and very inefficient, as the whole discussion here. This meta discussion shows very well that you need a better system how to put into order a lot of relevant ideas that no one can read anymore. The whole discussion here should have a mindmap with tags and flags and links for each item, and that is where my answer tries to add value. I could not find this idea up to now in the discussion, after reading quite some time, and the 6 points below are just a brainstorming how to implement this in non-meta SO.

The general issue first.
I have seen comments below questions saying "possible duplicate of...". When I had a case of 3 very similar or even duplicate questions, I added the 2 other links in such a comment below the question, saying "possible duplicate of". This is already bad work as you have to go through 3 questions, always taking out the other 2 links that are NOT the current question. In addition, I even had to care for which question was the first, because then the younger questions are the real duplicate candidates. 3x2links with right editing and reference to the oldest "right" question cost many minutes!

Why not add a new possibilty "mark as very similar" and / or "mark as very useful for [THESE] other questions" to a question, next to "mark as duplicate"?

Why not add a new possibility "mark as very similar/useful" with the right to propose more than one similar link (in contrast to the "one" duplicate that you usually need to mark?)

Why not add a new possibility "mark as very similar/useful" to both a question AND also to single answers, the latter then independent of the question, for the case that some answers are duplicates/similar/useful not in their question, but in their answers inside other contexts?

Finding duplicates is also about knowing which question was first, and not only about which question is best answered, when the duplicate was not seen early enough. This should be somehow managed with the new possibility "mark as very similar/useful", with a chronological order that still also considers the version change (the oldest question is of course not always the best source when it is 10 years ago)

Why not just adding the duplicates/marked similar/marked useful below each other in the same question window, formatted with different backgrounds, with the chance to
vote for questions/answers "locally" inside the duplicate/similar/useful sub-question/answer and "globally" inside the merged non-duplicate question?

Why not add a new possibility to include the tags of duplicate/similar/useful items in the tags of another question that does not have these tags yet? Either by adding the chance to add "further helpful tags and keywords" directly next to items, or by even adding the relevant sites directly below, and then making clear that this is a site with different but relevant tags.

All of these points should serve the aim of getting a one-site merger. This one-site merger will of course sometimes get very long, but with new ordering features (local and global flags/tags/links inside the "one-site merger" and its sub-items) this is something you can put into a well-ordered system where duplicates and similarities are 1.) no harm and 2.) add even welcomed nuances. What makes everything so time-intensive for adding value is if you have 3 sites open in parallel. The duplicates and similarities are no issue anymore if you have a merger of all with an intelligent context system, where you simply can flag single questions/answers inside the one-site merger.
If you e.g. say that an answer is a duplicate inside such a "merged site", it is not marked a duplicate in its "own site". Its "own site" again is directly linking to its "merged site" so that the user can decide if she wants to switch to the merger or not.

A user searching with "wrong" keywords hitting only a perhaps not perfect question because of her lack of keywords can then get offered the "merged site" or the "similarly tagged sites", and I do not mean the main overview that you get in the search box, but an integrated and perhaps also rewarded sub-system inside every possible question. Also, there could be item-wise links to the "similarly tagged" or otherwise related questions/answers with the tags and keywords to be proposed by users. The result should be that duplicates and similarities are no issue anymore but can be fully integrated in a welcoming and ordered item-wise wikipedia-like system.

@oguzismail nope, duplicate questions are conceptually the same question. It's not 'how to delete a file' vs 'how to delete a database', it's 'how can I add rows to a database' vs 'how should I use insert'.
– BraiamMay 31 at 20:09

Then this is simply a wrong wording, as the meaning of a duplicate - to me and to everyone else you might ask - is to be the same, not just very similar. This is in the generally known meaning of the word. If that is the only confusion here, why not changing the name duplicate to something more intuitive, like 'very similar' for example?
– LorenzJun 3 at 19:49

If closing duplicates were not fraught with problems then I don't see any issue with gamifying it - but closing duplicates is already contentious and problematic. I'm sure this will be downvoted, but note the number of votes on @Brondahl answer - this is not a fringe concern.

At least personally I see very frequent duplicate closures that are questionable if not downright incorrect. I have had questions closed as a duplicate that are clearly different, and while sometimes they can be re-opened this isn't always straightforward. I expect that there is a 'pile on' effect where questions from lower rep users are judged more harshly, and the flagging behaviour of higher rep users is followed more blindly.

I'd prefer to see a duplicate / similar question linking capability than further empower the 'closing culture'.

IMO there are two things to consider here:

'Closing as duplicate' from the perspective of the new user

How does a new user react when their first question is closed as a duplicate?
Does this fit into our stated goal of being welcoming to new users?
What if it's not actually a duplicate, but is just flagged as such?

'Closing as duplicate' from the perspective of the experienced user

Is an experienced user truly entering duplicate questions, or are they merely similar yet contain nuanced differences? If an experienced user who is asking the question - with experience in relevant subject matter - feels that it is not a duplicate, why do we trust a reviewer - far less likely to be as experienced in the subject matter - to verify as duplicate?

"What if it's not actually a duplicate, but is just flagged as such?" New users as well as old hands both have the opportunity to explain why it is not a duplicate. This is explained in the link that appears with this reason.
– usr2564301May 22 at 0:58

1

Yeah. But you CLOSED it. And while it's CLOSED nobody can aswer my non-duplicate question. That's the problem. What's wrong with duplicate/no close, with the opportunity to downvote spurious attempts to flag as duplicate. It seems to me that a very significant percentage of dup/closes are incorrect, and an even greater percentage are unhelpful.
– Robin DaviesMay 22 at 6:07

Do you have any numbers supporting that claim? From my experience it happens rarely that a user edits there question after being duplicate closed which I interpret as the duplicate fits.
– BDLMay 22 at 8:07

1

Try to remember that answers move around based on votes and freshness, saying such and such answer above is never useful, just provide a link to the answer using the Share link.
– LankymartMay 22 at 10:08

@BDL no - but I would hope that before implementing this (or any change like this) SO technical product owners perform a plenty of data analysis to understand the nature of duplicate closures.
– Kirk BroadhurstMay 27 at 22:55

No, please no. Stack Overflow already has a big enough problem with close warriors, who feel they're performing a sacred duty by removing useful content and keeping the unworthy from getting help. They already overuse the close-as-duplicate feature to close questions that are either distinct problems that call for similar solutions or where their poor understanding of the language/tool the question is about makes them think a question is duplicate when it's not. We don't need to amplify that behavior by rewarding it.

To clarify and highlight something from the comments: It's possible to close questions in a way that's not antisocial, but only when you set out to help the asker solve their problem by helping them find existing information that already sufficiently addresses their need or improve their question to clarify how existing information does not cover what they want to know. "Curation" in the form of trawling through questions just looking for ones to close is inherently antisocial behavior and should not be something that is happening on this site, much less rewarded.

Reduction of duplicates would be much better achieved not by incentivizing antisocial behaviors, but by improving the workflow for new (and old) users asking questions to help them actually find relevant possible-duplicates. Right now it's laughably bad. Just Googling is more likely to find Stack Overflow questions that already answer your question than the suggested-duplicates feature does.

... removing useful content and keeping the unworthy from getting help <-- that couldn't be further from the truth. They are pointing these users to the place(s) where the best answers can already be found, dupe closures are intended to be helpful to the OP (and questions closed as dupes don't get removed by roomba the same way as other closed/downvoted Q, so if you want content removed you don't close as dupe). If sometimes they want to close it promptly for certain types of questions, it's because they know there will be suboptimal or even totally broken answers coming within minutes.
– wimMay 13 at 16:08

28

Closing questions is not antisocial behaviour. If we wouldn't close questions, we would be the same unsearchable mess that hundreds of other sites are.
– BDLMay 13 at 16:12

5

Closing questions with good cause, as part of using the site normally and attempting to answer questions, after making a good faith effort to assist the asker in improving the question or finding an existing answer to their problem, is not antisocial. Trawling through the question feed just to look for things to close is antisocial.
– R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICEMay 13 at 16:34

15

As long as the duplicates are correct, I see no problem with that. If your point is that incorrect dupes shouldn't be rewarded, then there is already a good answer by Dukeling about balancing accuracy/quantity.
– BDLMay 13 at 16:44

3

Then you have no problem with antisocial behavior. That's a legitimate opinion but one I strongly disagree with and oppose. Sites should do everything they can to discourage antisocial behavior by users because it makes the user experience miserable for everybody else.
– R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICEMay 13 at 16:47

11

@R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE: There is more than one user experience. We often forget that the main use case for Stack Overflow is opening hits from search engines. It is already difficult to find relevant answers in the 19 million questions.
– Peter MortensenMay 13 at 21:09

4

I 100% agree with this answer. Indeed, there are many here that seek to close/edit questions as long as it SOMEHOW fits a category to be moderated. Example: There's someone named PolyGeo on GIS that edits hundreds of questions for ANY small mistake. (Don't call me a complainer - look at GIS right now or any time and I guarantee you will see them) No one does anything about it. I do not want to give more power to these types of people. Many duplicates are not even duplicates, it just doesn't fit the style of the elite moderator coder that thinks they are somehow better than everyone else.
– David May 15 at 10:02

18

Blaming members of the community that are willing to the janitorial work that keeps the site current and useful to the community is exactly what is wrong. IMO it's attitudes like this that are the problem, not those trying to maintain the quality of the site content for the benefit of everyone, not just those asking a specific problem. Maintaining that content and quality is a thankless task there is no "reputation" to be earned, they do it because they believe in the original community ethos.
– LankymartMay 15 at 11:53

Badges are a nice way to recognise the efforts of people who spend time closing duplicates. Thank you! (But I think awarding closing with reputation points might have more negative effects than positive ones.)

Personally, I would be more motivated to close questions as duplicates if some of the problems were fixed, so that I would feel that my efforts were helpful to me, to the community and to lurkers. I'm talking about problems such as these:

often the "canonical" post is of low quality, the question is vague and includes irrelevant details, it is only made canonical because it happens to be the oldest

often the "canonical" post has an old incorrect out-of-date answer pinned to the top. No matter how many downvotes it collects, it still stays pinned to the top (this one could so easily be fixed)

often the "canonical" post doesn't have the best answer, but one of the questions closed as duplicates has the best answer

you cannot migrate a good answer from a closed post to the "canonical" post. If you try to post a copy, the copy of the answer will get deleted by moderators. That means the answer that you poured hours into sometimes will languish in a closed question that people are not directed to, and the only way to migrate it to the "canonical" post is to delete the original answer and to effectively reset the score on the post

the guidance on the website is not clear enough that you should only close questions as duplicate if the questions themselves are duplicate. The guidance should be clear that merely being related is not enough justification to close something as duplicate. A surprising number of high-rep users think that it is.

Problem #1 is solved by editing the question. Problem #2 is solved by posting a new answer. Problem #3 is solved by flagging the duplicate for moderator attention and requesting a merge (this will move all answers from the duplicate to the canonical). Problem #4 is solved by posting the answer on the canonical in the first place (not on the duplicate). Problem #5 is... ? No, that guidance is clear. Two questions that are the same, or have the same answer, are duplicates by Stack Overflow standards. "Related" is not enough. I rarely, if ever, see incorrect closures as duplicate.
– Cody Gray♦May 22 at 8:56

1

replying to your comment here: Questions should only be closed as duplicate if there are the same question as another post, that's it. --> define the same. How would you identify if the question is the same or related or not related, etc? You cannot give any definition to this and it's up to expert to identify duplicates case by case. So Yes I close question with only related other question because I know they will give you the answer you need. Sometimes your are only missing a terminology or a name of a concept to understand your issue and fix your problem.
– Temani AfifMay 22 at 11:30

1

^ but if you think a duplicate should give you a ready-to-copy-past-code-that-solves-your-specific-issue then no, it doesn't work that way. SO doesn't work that you. You need to do the effort to understand the solution provided (all of them) and tailor them to your need
– Temani AfifMay 22 at 11:32

@TemaniAfif SO is for lurkers. SO should be helping lurkers find the answer to their question. If questions are closed merely because they are related, this is not helping lurkers and not building a valuable Q&A. Lazy people who close questions as duplicates are just as much a problem as lazy question askers.
– FlimmMay 22 at 12:18

@CodyGray Let me answer point by point. You said problem #1 is solved by editing the question, however, that is not the case, because the "canonical" question often have answers that refer to the irrelevant details and it would be unfair to the question asker and the people who already posted answers. The real solution to problem #1 is to pick the best, most "canonical" like question as the question that remains open and the target of duplicates, rather than the question that happens to be the oldest.
– FlimmMay 22 at 12:20

1

@CodyGray You said problem #2 is solved by posting a new answer. I'm surprised that you say this, as I would have thought that it is obvious that posting a new answer does not change which answer is pinned to the top. The only hope of changing the pinned answer is to get the OP to change the accepted answer, and often they are unreachable because the question is so old. No amount of downvotes can get the OP to mark a different answer as accepted.
– FlimmMay 22 at 12:22

1

@CodyGray Regarding what you said about problem #3. That's great. I've actually never done this, because it is not obvious that the moderators want people to do this. If the website was trying to merge duplicates, why wouldn't this be the default behaviour instead of something you have to message moderators to do?
– FlimmMay 22 at 12:23

@CodyGray You said problem #4 is solved by posting the answer on the canonical in the first place. But often, the questions aren't closed as duplicates until years later. There is no obvious way to migrate the answer without resetting its score.
– FlimmMay 22 at 12:24

It would lead to an unthinkable increase in the false dupe closures, whining users, and to a yet more unwelcoming site than it was in 2015.

Already the closure as dupe is a bad thing - if the asked questions are really the same, they should be merged, if not, they should left as they are. The closure as dupe tries to be something between the two, which is worse than both.

If Question1 is dupe of Question2, then also Question2 is the dupe of Question1.

If Question1 is the dupe of Question2, and Question2 is the dupe of Question3, then also Question1 is the dupe of Question3.

With other words: The "dupe-ness" is now a reference in the database, pointing from the dupe question to the original one. It is bad. Instead, there should be "dupe groups". A "dupe group" is a set of questions, where all members of the set are essentially the same as the others.

Summary: don't improve an already bad system into a yet more worse direction.

Merging would eliminate one of the benefit of dupes -- to serve as a signpost. For instance, if a user asks "how do I get the value of a property of a nested object in JavaScript" and another user asks "how do I get the value of an attribute of an element of an associative array in JavaScript", the answer is the same. The appropriate name is "property" and "object", not "attribute" and "associative array", but setting the latter question as a duplicate of the former lets people searching for the mistaken names find the appropriate one. Merging would remove the mistaken names.
– Heretic MonkeyMay 13 at 12:12

@HereticMonkey Because merging deletes the dupe question, which is yet another fault. Instead, the correct system would be this: instead of that dupe-ness is now a reference to another (so-named "original") question, there should be "dupe groups". Questions belonging to the same "dupe group" are all dupe of the others. You miss the differentiation between the "how is it now" and "how it should be".
– peterh - Reinstate MonicaMay 13 at 12:13

I actually like the concept of duplicate groups. It might take some time to figure out a way to implement it without getting into a huge mess for low-quality duplicates of the famous "What is a nullpointer exception" and "What is a linker error" canonicals. But with some additional way to decide which members of the group are shown, that could be a nice system. BUT: I really wouldn't never upvote the answer as it stands now. The idea is good, but the presentation is overly aggressive and insulting. If you really want to make a point, present it in a non-confrontational way.
– BDLMay 13 at 13:18

2

I'm also not sure if your suggestion and rewarding duplicate finders are orthogonal. Rewarding people who add posts to the correct duplicate group could also be rewarded. This gives an incentive not to answer the n-th duplicate instead of merging/closing/dupe-group-adding it.
– BDLMay 13 at 13:25

@BDL The LQ dupes are solved by that they are voted down and auto-deleted. Anyways the system tries to hide the downvoted questions from the public (somewhere I SEDEd a little bit and found that the average question score what a random visitor see, is about 70). Yes, I believe this reward would be a good idea with a correct dupe system. (P.s. Any idea, why you can not get the list of the posts which were edited after you voted them? Not only that you do not get a notification, if a vote change is possible, but you can not even find them!)
– peterh - Reinstate MonicaMay 13 at 13:38

2

Re "Spolsky & Co had to create something quickly, and they did not think too much in such details at the time.": No, on the contrary. It was extremely well researched and both founders had extensive experience with BBSes, Usenet, forums, successful and unsuccessful similar sites, and their own blogs/sites. That said, there is certainly room for improvement. We still use the tired old Q&A model where we submit text in boxes to a long linear list, directly onto the public Internet.
– Peter MortensenMay 13 at 21:22

@PeterMortensen Well, I admit that creating this system from the nothing was a big result. I modify my (now mod-deleted) statement: 1. they wanted to reward the author of the original question 2. it was simply impossible to foresee all details and their all possible consequences. I still blame them because they don't improve anything since then. (P.s. any idea, why a question can not be taken over / "community-accepted" if its OP disappears or is deleted?)
– peterh - Reinstate MonicaMay 14 at 1:33

I think the group would definitely be a benefit, it's an interesting idea, it would still allow for all dupes to point to the most up-voted one in the list, could show the top 3 with an option to click view more. It almost sounds like a feature-request to me :)
– IcepickleMay 14 at 22:42

What problem are you trying to solve?

I understand that you feel that closing duplicate questions is beneficial, and I don't think anyone would disagree -- that of course is why we have that capability in the first place. And I understand that you think that it's so important that it should be incentivized. What I don't understand is why you think there's a problem here that needs a solution.

Are there a lot of duplicate questions that aren't getting closed as such? Are there a lot of questions that get a few answers, but which are later closed as duplicates?

If you believe that there's a real problem here, then you should demonstrate that by finding some data that supports your assertion. For questions created in 2020 and closed as duplicate, what's the mean difference between creation date and close date in, say, minutes? What's the standard deviation? SO's data explorer makes it easy to get the kind of data you'd need to show that there's a problem (if there really is a problem), and including that kind of information in your proposal will help you build support for your idea.

Only providing anecdotical evidences, but yes: There are a lot of well known duplicates which get answered before being closed as duplicate. Often by high-rep users who should now better but do it because they gain rep from it. Related discussion: 1
– BDLMay 11 at 17:14

5

Imagine that you are using a new library/tool and to find an answer in the docs you had to visit 5 different websites, piecing together info from each, and some of the sites were written for older versions of the software. The problem to solve is fragmentation. For the most common questions that come up again and again, the "canon" answers can be kept to the highest standard of quality when we are all looking in the same place. Typically those answer(s) have been groomed and maintained by many, subject to peer review, and are higher quality than what a FGITW will bang out in 30 seconds.
– wimMay 11 at 17:18

10

Are there a lot of duplicate questions that aren't getting closed as such? Yes. Are there a lot of questions that get a few answers, but which are later closed as duplicates? Also yes.
– wimMay 11 at 17:18

11

The research presented here is quite relevant, data included too. This SEDE query, for example, shows that a non-insignificant percentage of answers are posted on confirmed duplicate questions.
– E_net4 is downhaustedMay 11 at 17:21

2

@E_net4hasnofixedusername That's exactly the kind of data that should be presented in the original post. I should probably have dug deeper and run the queries myself (because the graphs in the post are 4 years old), but my point here is that this would be a stronger proposal if it presented supporting data. Looking at the data, there's been a decline in monthly answers to dupes (50K in 2014, ~33K now) in recent years, and Percent of answers added on confirmed dupes has been relatively flat at about 2.5% since 2013. I'm not arguing against the proposal, just suggesting an improvement.
– CalebMay 11 at 18:04

No, it isn't

Stack Overflow already has a justified reputation
of unreasonably marking "duplicates" - this will only exacerbate it. If anything, there should be measures discouraging falsely marking duplicates.

The "upper-echelon" here often forget that not everyone is an expert at the topics they ask the questions in, so what counts as "explained already" for them may not explain anything to the asker - or not explain enough. And that's just one on a list of reasons.

Also perhaps make it impossible to vote for close-as-dup without having a badge for at least one of the question tags (i.e. having demonstrated sufficient expertise to be able to judge dups on the topic).
– R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICEMay 13 at 16:01

@R..GitHubSTOPHELPINGICE: Do you have any numbers on how many dupe closures involve a close-voter with, let's say, 100 points in one of the tags?
– BDLMay 13 at 16:16

@OverLordGoldDragon: If we don't trust silver badge holders to identify duplicates, who should we trust then? OP is also not the best option since they obviously have no clue about the correct answer. We had yesterday a huge discussion after someone copied the same answer to two questions (1-1 copy), both asker accepted it. Then someone dropped by, deleted one of the answers and closed the questions as duplicates. Afterwards the asker claimed that it's for sure not a duplicate because the questions are not the same.
– BDLMay 13 at 16:38

2

@OverLordGoldDragon I didn't see the questions, so I don't know the truth of the matter. But you do realise that "has the same answer" != "is the same question". Plenty of different problems could have the same solution/answer. Like I said, didn't see the questions you're talking about, but I note that you haven't in your comment SAID that the questions were the same in anyway ... you've only observed that they had the same answer
– BrondahlMay 13 at 16:50

@BDL "Who should we trust then?" Great question, I don't have an answer. A formal redefinition of what a 'duplicate' should help.
– OverLordGoldDragonMay 13 at 17:01

@Brondahl I didn't say they have the same answer - but I do agree that "same answer" != "same question". I'll also update my wording a bit.
– OverLordGoldDragonMay 13 at 17:02

3

@OverLordGoldDragon: The definition of duplicate I advocate is "it's a duplicate if all possible answers to A are also answers to B". But there are exceptions for the well known duplicates because it simply doesn't make sense to explain every single time where the NullReferenceException happened or which library is missing in the linker settings.
– BDLMay 13 at 17:11

Triggered by a ... robust ... discussion in response to my first answer.

There is concern amongst some (disputed by others) that high-quality questions get marked as dupes undeservedly at a problematic rate, and that adding rep for dupe-marking will exacerbate that problem.

SOLUTION:

Add rep for marking as dupes, as OP suggested.

Add huge negative rep if a question that you voted as a dupe gets re-opened without material edits. (i.e. if a reopen request is "successful")

Either it's incredibly rare for this to happen legitimately, in which case that negative rep won't be a problem.

Or it's not rare, and there is in fact a problem here, and this system will add an incentive to properly examine the question you're marking as dupe in detail, ensure that the dupe-target does actually answer this question, and quickly self-check that you know enough about this topic to be making this judgement in the first case.

Likely also incentivises you to engage in a discussion with the Asker, if you aren't 100% certain that it's a dupe.

Note that the asker on their own won't be able to force the re-open, only the community (via re-open request on the meta forum) would be able to do that. So you don't need to convince the Asker that you were right - only the community. Equivalently, you only incur the penalty if the community agrees that you were incorrect in your dupe-marking.

It won't impact dupe-marking on incredibly low-quality questions from lazy users, because

those users won't petition for reopening, and

you know for sure that the community would agree with you if they did.

Posted as a new answer, to ensure that vote feedback on this specific proposed solution is kept separate from feedback on the general concern of my initial answer.
– BrondahlMay 12 at 17:34

2

For anyone who argues that this will disincentivise dupe-marking ... only if you aren't certain that it's a dupe. If you are completely sure (which is the case that others are claiming is the problematic case) then you have nothing to fear. If you aren't completely sure ... then yeah getting you to pause and think twice rather than throwing in a dupe vote that you haven't checked too hard and wouldn't risk some rep on is the exact point I'm trying to achieve.
– BrondahlMay 12 at 17:36

2

Similarly, if rep is a "how much should we trust this person's opinion" metric ... then yes ... we should definitely have less trust in people who have injustly closed questions. They A) have shown poor judgement for the narrow subject matter, and B) have made the space less welcoming for the user they just shut-down.
– BrondahlMay 12 at 17:37

10

This is a horrible idea. Whatever you believe about whether there are now rogue high-rep users inappropriately closing questions, or whether new rules will create a flood of such users, you cannot propose any mechanism that would cause any drastic loss of reputation, because that will simply be gamed by revenge-seekers. Users already suffer from revenge-downvotes for legitimate mod actions, enough so that SO even has a daily script meant to try to detect and reverse such behavior. ...
– Peter DunihoMay 12 at 17:43

2

... And that's where it often costs the downvoter 1 rep point to only damage their enemy 2 points. Offering a mechanism to cause a person to suffer "huge negative rep" is idiotic and will only attract the very worst behavior from these people.
– Peter DunihoMay 12 at 17:43

1

@PeterDuniho how exactly would a user game this to achieve revenge?
– BrondahlMay 12 at 17:51

3

As I spelt out in detail in the answer, in order to incur a penalty the community would have to conclude that the action was incorrect. Did you not read all the way down my answer? Or do you think that there are users who are able to manipulate the meta-community?
– BrondahlMay 12 at 17:52

9

"the community would have to conclude that the action was incorrect." -- the community is already today reopening questions that have no business being reopened. The community also upvotes questions that should be downvoted and closed. Even with the old five-vote threshold for reopening this risk would exist, and three votes today is far too easy to make this proposal viable, especially given that the author of the question themselves gets a vote, and they are very often the ones seeking revenge, because they feel that even legitimate moderation actions have maligned them.
– Peter DunihoMay 12 at 17:59

2

Bottom line: if your apparent trust in the judgment of the community as a whole is genuine, then that trust is woefully naive.
– Peter DunihoMay 12 at 18:00

3

"SO needs to be protected from the community, because that community doesn't know what's good for it" -- Don't put words in my mouth. That's not what I said at all. All I've said is that you would be an idiot to put as much power into the community's hands as you are proposing here. That's a very different thing. Giving the community ways to nudge the state of the site in small increments is fine, and things average out in the long run. Giving the community a way to impose (in your own words) a "huge" penalty on any one user in one swell foop, that's just idiotic. Plain and simple.
– Peter DunihoMay 12 at 18:03

11

I don't think any solution that punishes people for honest actions, even if they're incorrect, should be considered. At most it should lead to a temporary ban from dupe voting like what happens with repeated bad edits or reviews.
– John MontgomeryMay 12 at 18:07

3

@Brondahl Sorry, I should have been clearer, I meant moderation actions, which (unless you count edit suggestions, which still can't give negative rep) have never been tied to reputation whether positive or negative.
– John MontgomeryMay 12 at 19:07

4

Uhh .. I think the grey-ing out is the negative votes, not the result of a 'deletion' action? Not certain though. (Which to be clear, I am in favour of ... answers that the relevant community consistently deems poor should be made less accessible.) If your complaint is "I don't think the community should have downvoted this answer because I like it", well that's a different kind of issue :D
– BrondahlMay 15 at 10:28

2

I'm fascinated that there are 2 delete votes on this answer. Would those voters like to explain why it is that they think this suggestion is so offensive to StackOverflow Meta that it should be entirely removed. Not that they disagree and don't think that it should be implemented, but that it offensive to even talk about such that should be entirely deleted so that no-one can see it or discuss the pros and cons.
– BrondahlMay 21 at 12:00

2

@AndrasDeak I don't get it either. This seems to go deeply against the spirit of open discussion, and I don't see any guidelines or FAQ anywhere suggesting that deleting works differently on Meta.
– Benjamin W.May 23 at 21:27

This is a very bad idea. I already almost never bother to ask substantive questions on SO or any of its sister sites because the Deletionists close them as dupes before I get a useful answer about 50% of the time. The rest is 30% I answer it myself (probably 50/50 on whether I find that answer through feedback on the question), and 20% of the time I get a real answer.

Stackoverflow is, to me, largely a read-only site, because of close-as-duplicate. This has the result that I do not have significant reputation and mostly cannot participate in discussions about whether things are working well. For every person who uses the site heavily, there are hundreds more like me (or thousands, even), who are disenfranchised by the way the site works.

I'm confused, you say that people "close them as dupes before I get a useful answer about 50% of the time," but doesn't the duplicate have the useful answer you needed, and the person who found it was even faster than someone typing out a new answer? It seems that closing as a duplicate gives you that useful answer you're seeking, unless you're asserting that the target question is not an accurate duplicate.
– Davy MMay 27 at 21:04

4

Duplicate closing doesn't delete the question. You have 15 questions on SO currently, non of them closed as duplicate. From the around 30 question you asked networkwide, only one is currently duplicate closed.
– BDLMay 27 at 21:06

@DavyM: No, because the duplicates are rarely if ever actually asking the same question.
– Jacob KopczynskiMay 28 at 0:24

I had a long, month-long fight to keep one of my questions alive, which resulted in no one ever actually answering it because only recent questions and ones which happen to score highly in search queries get seen by potential answerers. I have had to fight for all those other 14 as well. Well, not for the one posted today. Yet.
– Jacob KopczynskiMay 28 at 0:25

@JacobKopczynski In which case, have you thought to yourself maybe there is something about my questions that could be improved to stop this happening or better yet have I searched enough so that the likelihood of the question being a duplicate is less?
– LankymartMay 28 at 8:22

6

Do you know that they didn't actually read your question, or are you just assuming that because you don't like the outcome? People don't close a question as a duplicate just to be a jerk, they do it because they think it's a duplicate. Maybe the duplicate target is a better fit than you first assumed, or maybe it isn't clear to other people what makes your question different.
– John MontgomeryMay 28 at 18:02

Is it possible to automate this process? For example, I've been working through Robert Sedgewick's Java book, "Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Introduction." He has a Sketch datatype which he devised that will take two text documents and assign a number between 0 and 1 which represents how similar they are. For example, if comparing "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain with "Huckleberry Finn," which is also by Mark Twain, the number is very high, say 0.9. If comparing one of those books with a book by a different author, the number is lower. I'll include the code below, which is also available at the book website. Of course that may not be the best solution, but I was just thinking that there could be a way to automate at least part of the drudgery of it given that we have all of these talented software engineers on the board!

The awarding of badges is already automated.
– Robert LongsonMay 23 at 20:02

Is the process of finding duplicates itself automated to any degree already? In that case a badge woudn't even be necessary.
– Hank IgoeMay 23 at 20:07

1

All duplicates are manually identified.
– Robert LongsonMay 23 at 20:30

9

On Stack Overflow, "duplicate" does not mean "identical text". If it did, then, yes, it could be trivially automated. However, on Stack Overflow, duplicate means "these two questions have the same answer". That requires a human to identify, and sometimes it even requires a subject-matter expert who already knows the answer.
– Cody Gray♦May 24 at 8:04

There is already a huge number of questions falsely marked as duplicates. This would make it worse.

Granted, this is anecdotal, but my subjective experience is that when Google links me to an answer that is marked as a duplicate, going to the original question has a high chance of bringing me to a question that is related but different.

True duplicates often ask the same question with different wording.

Closed questions can't be answered, so we lose replies that would have been written using the context and wording of the question.

Why not simply allow duplicates to be answered, which preserves different wording for both questions and answers, giving more words for search indexes to index and making it easier to find?

The second bullet point is questionable. Distributing answers to the same problem over multiple pages will not make them easier to find. I also don't think this is an argument in the discussion whether duplicates should be rewarded but more a general argument against dupe-closing (which is not the discussion in this meta question). For the first point: Do you have any numbers on how many questions are wrongly closed?
– BDLMay 24 at 18:23

8

Your first bullet point seems like utter nonsense. At best, it's a completely unsubstantiated claim, and one that runs entirely counter to my experience. If there are truly such a large number of questions in your tags of interest falsely marked as duplicates, then please do something about it: post a list on Meta, vote to re-open them, etc. Your second bullet point is exactly why we close questions as duplicates. The duplicate is kept around, serving as a pointer to the main question, precisely because different people may tend to use different wording to describe the same problem.
– Cody Gray♦May 24 at 21:48

2

Like @BDL stated, the second bullet point does not make much sense. It would have basically the same effect to just link to the duplicate (which is what SE is already doing).
– TheTechRobo36414519May 25 at 14:21

This is an argument against duplicate rewarding and closing altogether.

Let users ask questions and receive answers based on their particular uses and applications, even though that question has qualities similar to another. Applications are different. One builds an app for sciences, another for government, another for the gaming industry etc. So they might all be faced with a similar problem, but because their applications or uses are different, they might each need a different solution to the same problem due to the structure of their codes or technologies. Applications continue to increase and so do uses.

Similar to the answers here, there's no such thing as a DUPLICATE! I once asked a question while I was new to SO, and it was quickly flagged as duplicate. Needless to say I was discouraged from using SO for quite a long time. You don't have to guess what my thought were at the guy who flagged the duplicate and the culture at SO. I had follow-up questions (which I never posted) and even though my question and the one mine was mirrored to were similar on their face, they were quite different in expected outcome. I pointed out the clear differences but still remained marked as such. This is to show the impression left to a new user (since one answer has touched on this).

(in layman's terms)

OUTCOMES

Two people can ask exactly the same questions expecting two different results.

Two people can ask exactly the same questions looking for two dissimilar approaches. The mirrored question might not contain the approach being sort.

Two people can ask exactly the same questions but on the basis of two underlying technology versions (e.g. PHP 5.5 and PHP 7.4). Times change. So does technology. And some of those 'good' answers become outdated.

Today I search for answers pertaining to custom repositories for the CMS I use. I found the answers but not what I was looking for. So I openned a new one.

LEVELS OF COMPREHENSION

I frequently meet with questions that are similar and only one has a proper answer. And I always thank God it was never flagged as a duplicate.

Programmers don't like being shepherded. We like standards and we like to choose freely. That's why there are many of us. We don't even understand much the same way. Our approaches are different to understanding code, and we like some answers better than others.

Certain questions flagged duplicate are sometime voted more than their original counterparts, indicating user's affinity to the duplicate. It show that something rung true with them with the duplicate. And those who choose to vote up them originals (and I have sometimes), show their affinity to the original based on what they were looking for. That's what voting is for.

So let users decide what's duplicate and what's not. The best SO can do is to fetch as many similar questions as it can find and present them to the user to choose from - after asking the question. What I mean is, propose similar questions, present a duplicate button to the user next to each so-called duplicate and let the user himself decide whether it's a duplicate. Also add a dismiss button to give him the opportunity to dismiss it as a non-duplicate. Give the questioner the tools to do it. Let him decide. If at all SO would like to clean-up, then perhaps have a group that clearly works on questions that have remained inactive for at least five-or-so years old or older. And even so SO would still wipe out subtle points in those questions when someone new wants to contribute to them.

IN SUMMARY

It's not about getting the answer you want. It's about getting the answer suitable for your uses which others can share in. Duplicates provide a different perspective from the original, unique to itself. If you were to change the original question, prior answers might appear slightly disjointed. When you try out all the solutions in the duplicated question and none works for you, there' no need to wait for someone to come around and provide more answers to that question. It can take forever. It would be nice to let the user ask a new question without worrying about that question being flagged as a duplicate. It will help many others over time. Lots of people in SO use disclaimers to make clear that even though their question is similar to another, it shouldn't be deemed as a duplicate for certain reasons.

@user4642212 Editing already answered questions other than for clarity should be discouraged because of losing its original appeal, meaning, direction and purpose. Just like editing your boss's letter, you make sure you don't change it's original meaning or add to it. Additionally, requiring two different results is not something people normally do know how to do. They just know how to ask and look for what they need.
– John MillerMay 19 at 11:49

7

“I found the answers but not what I was looking for. So I openned a new one.” — Good. As long as you demonstrate your research effort, i.e. links to existing questions, and explain how none of the proposed solutions work, your question should be fine. “Programmers don't like being shepherded” — you aren’t. Closing questions as duplicate is site curation, not “shepherding” people. If you don’t understand existing answers, again, say so explicitly.
– user4642212May 19 at 11:49

7

“Editing already answered questions” — No, I mean editing your questions as soon as users start suggesting duplicates, if you disagree with the suggestions. That’s the point of the link.
– user4642212May 19 at 11:51

3

“Additionally, requiring two different results is not something people normally do know how to do. They just know how to ask and look for what they need.” — What do you mean here? The expected results should be mentioned in the question explicitly (otherwise, how would answerers confidently know how to approach a question?). That’s ideally how debugging questions should be structured anyway: MCVE, errors, current results, desired results.
– user4642212May 19 at 11:55

@user4642212 Like I suggested, it's hardly what people do. Running a pristine site is one thing, but bear in mind users thinking and behavior. When one read their answers they want to know - was I understood correctly? is majorly their first response. I've laid my answer in layman's terms.
– John MillerMay 19 at 11:57

1

So, say I ask a question like "How do I set the top and left properties of this absolutely positioned HTML element so that it always shows up beneath another element that has a fixed position" The answer is to set the element to use position fixed. But I've got it in my mind that I have to use position absolute. Someone votes to close my question as a duplicate of a question which presents the same scenario, and was solved by using position fixed. But I really want to use absolute. Should I be able to hold up the closure of my question just because I can't let go of my way of doing things?
– Heretic MonkeyMay 19 at 12:54

5

Am I wrong or this is just a rant and not even close to an answer?
– Temani AfifMay 19 at 13:28

11

I wouldn't go as far as suggesting that this is a plain rant, but it's yet another presentation of having the wrong expectations. We write question and answers so that they are useful to future visitors. We don't tailor questions just for the asker. Making an effort to apply an existing solution to your problem is part of the workflow, not demanding for the solution to be spoonfed for your scenario.
– E_net4 is downhaustedMay 19 at 13:39

4

For one, such requirements might not make sense and could represent an XY problem. If there is no such built-in function for doing something, you either let the duplicates come in or hit a dead end. With that said, editing the question with valid reasons for why the proposed duplicate does not apply is fine and the intended course of action.
– E_net4 is downhaustedMay 19 at 14:27

7

I was responding to the proposed solution of allowing users to dismiss proposed duplicates: "Give the questioner[s] the tools to do it. Let [them] decide." In my hypothetical situation, I could decide that everyone else is wrong and my question is not a duplicate. Just pointing out how that would not work. I've had many people refuse to see the duplicate nature of their question, even when the duplicate question was the same, and they had accepted an answer that was plagiarized from the duplicate.
– Heretic MonkeyMay 19 at 14:32

6

This answer doesn't seem to be related to the discussion whether duplicate closing should in some way be rewarded. If you want to argue against duplicate closing in itself, this is the wrong place.
– BDLMay 19 at 15:36

7

The answer does show the (in my opinion, unjustified) frustration that certain users feel when seeing their question closed as duplicate. The answer doesn't address the problem and barely even acknowledges the problem: so many users asking questions that are already answered here, without an adequate search to find the existing answers (and other users adding substandard answers rather than linking to the existing content). It harms the site by duplicating and fragmenting information, muddying search results. How do you propose to solve this problem, without alienating question askers?
– wimMay 19 at 16:54

14

SO is a Q&A repository, not a help desk. There are dozens of questions I've come here to ask, only to come across a duplicate while I was researching additional details or typing it up, so I didn't need to ask my question after all. Were those duplicates exactly 100% applicable to my specific situation? No. Did they solve my problem anyway? Yes.
– John MontgomeryMay 19 at 17:34

2

Duplicates provide a different perspective from the original, unique to itself. If the perspective is significant enough that the answer should be different, then the two questions likely aren't duplicates. But unless the circumstances surrounding a question would affect the answer, they don't matter. Dividing by zero is always an error, whether you're working on scientific software, a game, a government app, whatever. Marking duplicates is meant to help users quickly find smaller numbers of (hopefully) higher quality questions and answers, and for the most part it works.
– CalebMay 22 at 19:57

i mean... when a given duplicate has been answered thousands of times... it's hardly fair to expect multiple people to find the same one, especially with how bad the duplicate search box is currently.
– Kevin BFeb 18 at 20:52

32

My measure of accuracy is not "did many users agree on the target" it's "did the target help the OP"
– wimFeb 18 at 20:55

6

For big dupe targets like the NPE question and so on, this would make sense, but those are also the ones where a solution like this would be least needed. For less well-used dupes, the odds of multiple people even finding the same one in a search much less reaching the exact same conclusion are a lot lower.
– John MontgomeryFeb 18 at 23:03

7

I’m less interested in whether people pick the same target, and more interested in whether they pick the right set of targets.
– user4642212Feb 18 at 23:30

1

Do you have any evidence that people routinely vote for dupes just because somebody else already picked one?
– Asteroids With WingsMay 10 at 13:38

6

Actually, I certainly do so. Whenever I see a question which I know was asked before, I am happy when someone has already found the duplicate-vote-target, so I could just vote and get done with it.
– anatolygMay 10 at 16:14

2

@wim In my opinion, lurkers should be prioritised over question askers. We're trying to build Q&A that is useful to many people, not just to the one person asking the question.
– FlimmMay 22 at 8:31